man’s hair at a ghost’s
forgotten – but never
forgiven – touch.
I become lush with fervor
and learned to be pilot-blue.
But while I burn like matches,
the shouting distance
between me and everyone
else grew more than
by an atlas – it all grew
by a moon.
12/20/10
Wilted Feathers
These feathers
were once a mythic gold,
these feathers
were once a dusky red,
these feathers
were once a blue you can find in tears.
But now all I see are ruined feathers
clumped together on the floor of this
rainy weather, the raindrops
drowning the legacy
out of the feathers.
Yet when I let them go, they still
float off into the soft wind together.
I guess that even the drowned
souls can fly sometimes.
Winter Black Funeral
I’m here to stay like chalk
glyphs picked into the pavement,
waiting for those drops of drought
to flop down like workday feet
and gasp me out like birthday
candles. That’s just as
well since I was
born only for this.
I’m no different from you –
I’ve been shackled to orbit
around a thick wick light –
funny how the closer I
get, the more I breathe night.
I dream for the sleep,
I retract my claws,
and I breathe out prayers
as cheap and wasted as air.
October 24, 2010
Winter Ecumenism
It seems like this winter is
just giving in – what with the snow
crunching beneath our feet
like loose change just jingles
faintly now, rattling like
keys in pockets do.
Our heavy coats unthread into
blankets bled on beaches leeched
by waves in these days of night.
The sun’s taking lazy bites
at the soil; the plants yawn
up through the bite marks,
waving us closer, trying to find
the right words to say.
The bitter British winds
begin to oven into sprays
of kite-winds that raise all parachutes
until the strings break for lunch.
The hinges stretch on the screen door
as we slip into the outside
that we’ve been dreaming for.
March 9, 2010
Winter Solstice
You live for just one moment
in my seeing, but even that’s too much –
You slip between the floorboards,
flooding out my thinking.
You live for as long
as it takes me to walk by,
and I already forget everything. Even
down to what color your hair is – it
was either rust or jet. It was either
or maybe neither.
Yes, I forget things that quick.
March 28, 2010
Writer’s Cornerstone
All I need is one good line
and the rest will steel up
from there – twisted out
of the heavy summer air
and stuck back in the sky
like Macbeth’s dagger plunged.
Feel Jacob’s ladder rungs
turn string at the weight
of words that I can barely
carry in my pocket, the seams
spitting fabric at the vowels
massive enough to drip worlds
like sweat from brow.
This is not the way that these
things work, though – instead
the hesitation mosses on me
until when you see me, you
see forest. Even stones buried
from the world in coffee soil
like coffins are still more
porous, lighter in all definitions
than my words are, than I am.
I pick words denser than gravity,
waiting for the magic to free me
upwards to paint-speckled skies,
stars carved in its thousand
horsefly eyes. I reach for the
scatter, pretending they’re
the crumbs of the apple pie.
Yet somehow in all my crinkled
pages, I’m still amazed to think
that it’s because of this that
I will write as if this has never happened.
May 25, 2010